Alright, so you're saying (via your quote) that tomatoes are not quantifiable? — javra

Sure, language is ambiguous, and we can say that there is a certain quantity of tomatoes or a certain number of tomatoes. But the quantity of tomatoes, although it can be given as a number, could also be given as a weight or a volume. Of course, these weights or volumes are also expressed in numbers, but Bateson's point is that number is discrete, whereas quantity, insofar as a distinction can be made between it and number, is not.

So, we can have exactly three tomatoes, but we cannot have exactly three kilograms or cubic centimeters of tomatoes.

:up:

You might say that artists came to understand how to convey the ‘real world’ more accurately over time, whereas I’d say that their pictorial constructions of the world changed not by better approximating it but by shifting their worldview to accord with changing purposes. — Joshs

I'd say that people came to understand the principles of perspective and to explore image-making in accordance with these newfound principles, and then later came to deliberately represent things in ways that contravene those principles. Photographs do not contravene the principles of perspective, though, and those principles do best formulate how we normally see things.

If we want to discover whether people see the same things and features of things all we have to do is ask. It is a commonplace fact that people do see the same things including relatively insignificant features of things, and this can easily be proven if they are asked to look closely and report what they see.

What is the 'it' that rains? Really there is no such object, there is simply 'raining' but the structure of our language is such that it has to be expressed in those terms. — Wayfarer

It's obvious; the sky rains.

The way I have come to understand it is that there are domains of discourse within which words derive their meaning. — Wayfarer

You're leaving out half of the picture: it's not just domains of discourse, but the domains of experience which give the domains of discourse sense. You cannot have a language game without the commonality of experience that provides something to talk about.

Numbers - more accurately, quantity - is something the occurrence of a physical reality essentially entails (otherwise one would have a quantity-devoid, partless, etc. reality - which is not what the physical presents itself to be). — javra

" NUMBER IS DIFFERENT FROM QUANTITY
This difference is basic for any sort of theorizing behavioral science, for any sort of imagining of what
goes on between organisms or inside organisms as part of their processes of thought.
Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that
numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.
Between two and three, there is a jump. In the case of quantity, there is no such jump; and because jump is missing in the world of quantity, it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.
Even when number and quantity are clearly discriminated, there is another concept that must be
recognized and distinguished from both number and quantity. For this other concept, there is, I think, no
English word, so we have to be content with remembering that there is a subset of patterns whose
members are commonly called "numbers." Not all numbers are the products of counting. Indeed, it is the
smaller, and therefore commoner, numbers that are often not counted but recognized as patterns at a
single glance. Card-players do not stop to count the pips in the eight of spades and can even recognize the characteristic patterning of pips up to "ten."
In other words, number is of the world of pattern, gestalt, and digital computation; quantity is of the
world of analogic and probabilistic computation."

Gregory Bateson Mind and Nature- A necessary Unity

I've never quite known if they go as far as the critics suggest. :wink: I think they are probably an easy target... relativism this... relativism that... blah, blah blah. Like Chomsky I find them too complex to formulate a clear understanding, and I've never had the time. But I have to say, what I do know I find fascinating.

When I read Rorty, I am sometimes stuck by the romanticism underpinning the thinking - 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.' — Tom Storm

The postmodernist who best represents the obscurity I have in mind is Derrida; his idea of the endless deference of meaning I find unconvincing and his writing generally impenetrable on account of the ambiguity and arcane references. When his philosophy is boiled down to its central ideas, it seems neither groundbreaking nor insightful.

So, I would say " too obscure" rather than "too complex", and I doubt it is possible to formulate "a clear understanding", and even if it were I doubt it would be worth the effort, since it seems to be mostly sophistry. I know what you mean by "finding it fascinating"; it does have a kind of poetic fascination in its eccentric wordplay, and perhaps the language can be enjoyed just for its own sake.

From the little I have read of their work; I find Foucault and Deleuze are much more philosophically interesting. I am yet to read Rorty; I have had Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature on my shelves for years and am yet to get around to reading it.

I like the utopic vision expressed in the quote; probably a pipe dream, but a nice one, nonetheless.

:up:

Joshs seems to be arguing that we paint differently, therefore there are no truths. — Banno

Yes, or that we don't see the same things, which I guess amounts to the same thing.

Very few painters have the ability (or desire) to represent any subject with photographic precision. How much less able are the unskilled to do that?

If the subject were a still life with flowers, vases, glasses and fruit, for example, and the instruction to represent every item, I have no doubt that most people would do that, which shows that people see the same things.

"Apple" has not only hundreds of other names but hundreds of descriptors and their respective meanings - from the literal, to the pragmatic/functional to the symbolic/metaphorical and figurative. — Benj96

Yes, but all the names of the apple are names of the apple, not of anything else. I don't think our language has a tenuous grasp on the shared world of common experience and understanding at all, it grasps that world just fine, but at the same time it has no grasp at all on the world of pre-perceptual affects that is prior to all our models, analyses and judgements.

It's funny how truth only seems to take something closer to solid form when death is the accompaniment. — Tom Storm

:lol: Yes, death or injury I guess. But still there are countless truths that deal with the natural constraints of a physical world: I can't walk through or see through walls, I can't fly, I can't even entertain two thoughts simultaneously, I cannot increase or decrease my size, weight or strength instantly, I can't know things I haven't learned, I can't change my appearance without resorting to disguise or plastic surgery...the list is huge...

The world affects us pre-perceptually in ways we cannot become conscious of, and it seems unarguable that its pre-perceptual effects, which give rise to, among other things, perception, do not constrain how we divide the world up in our perception and understanding of it. If the postmodernist says all is text, and we construct the world through and through, they go far too far, in my opinion.

Remember Crocodile Dundee and the kangaroo shooting back at the hunters? Love that. — Srap Tasmaner

:up: Sure do...me too!

Do they believe the way we divide up the world is arbitrary and entirely dependent on us? Well, they believe that there are better and worse, more or less valid ways to carve up the world, but the arbiter of validity is itself a construction. — Joshs

I agree, but the construction is based on the obvious commonality of human experience, which cannot be entirely explained by human construction. We cannot be conscious of the processes of perception, but we know that we all (most of us) perceive the same things, at the same times in the same places, which suggests that there is something about the structures of the world that give rise to that situation.

Put differently, the world speaks back to us in the language in which we couch our questions, so truth is the product of a ceaseless conversation between personal and interpersonal construction, and events.

That is only part of the story. We are affected pre-consciously, pre-linguistically, and if it was not for the pre-linguistic commonality of human experience, language could never have gotten started in the first place.

Not a conversation between subjects and a recalcitrant, independent reality, but a reciprocation in which the subjective and the objective poles are inextricably responsive to, and mutually dependent on each other.

The world we can talk about is obviously in part dependent on our ways of talking, but we have no control over the way the world is really; go out and stand on the expressway if you don't believe me.

We may agree about how we divide up the world within the bounds of a particular cultural episteme, but epistemes change historically, neither arbitrarily nor rationally, and with them our truths.

The basic truths, which are countless, like you will die if you try to swim across the Pacific Ocean, jump off Mt Everest or try to fight a tiger bare-handed don't change.

How do you know that some truths are necessary? How do you know that logic is not "something of our own manufacture"?
— Janus

The child can always endlessly ask 'why?'
— Janus — Wayfarer

Sure, but you are yet to even begin an argument for necessary truths as far as I can tell. In any case if you did present an argument, I would address it on its own terms, not try to evade the issue by asking further 'why' questions. (Note: the only necessary truths as far as I can tell are tautologies, things true by definition).

And, as usual, you have no answers for the questions I asked...way to engage!

Lawson seems to think that the way we divide the world up is somehow arbitrary and entirely dependent on us. I think that kind of postmodern thinking is absurd.

In any case, since we all (or most of us) agree about how we do divide the world up (whatever the explanation for that might be) then of course there are truths relative to that common division.

Notice this rhetorical sleight-of-hand which re-frames necessary truths as contingent. This is often deployed by way of speculations about the ‘multiverse’. It relativises the issue by suggesting that logic is 'for us', again, something of our own manufacture. — Wayfarer

How do you know that some truths are necessary? How do you know that logic is not "something of our own manufacture"?

I’ve noticed that Apokrisis tends to acknowledge only those aspects of Peirce’s philosophy which are pragmatically useful for modelling semiotic relationships whilst often disavowing his broader idealism. As Thomas Nagel put it, 'Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable'. I think that discomfort is often on display in these kinds of discussions. — Wayfarer

Is that an argument from authority? Are you suggesting that if Peirce was right about semiotics, that he must be right about idealism and/or God? Why would the human mind, being a part of nature not be in accordance with the nature it, according to you, constructs, or according to others is partially affected by, and partially constructs? And why should that be "uncomfortable" for a secular thinker? It's a kind of ad hominem move to attempt to dismiss secular conceptions of nature by explaining them away as being "blind spots" due to being unable to cope with "transcendence" or some such "discomforting'" idea. What you don't seem to get is that not everyone is convinced by the arguments you are, even though they understand those arguments perfectly well enough.

And what are you and Nagel actually even arguing for, if neither of yout identify as theists?

Considering the history of whaling, it's a wonder they don't also fuck with humans.

As I read him, 'closure' means the assigning of identities, attributes and relations to things on the interpretive basis of inferential understanding. It's how we infer the world to be, how we "carve it up" in a kind of general sense. It's not really a new idea but is rather an old idea dressed up in new clothes.

The hard part of seeing this is assigning truth value to affectivity. — Astrophel

We can assign, in the sense of feel, "truth value" in the affective. It has the sense of actuality, of truth in the sense of alethia or revealing (or "unconcealing"). The act-ual is revealed by acting, by affecting.

But this notion of truth is quite different than the idea of propositional truth, which applies only to statements or assertions.

It is on account of this "revealing" of actuality which is everyday experience (when we notice it) that we can say that everyday experience is (or can be) a revelation. But this has nothing to do with discursive knowledge or explanation, because as soon as the attempt is made to describe this experience in our necessarily dualistic language the original non-duality of the actual is more or less obscured. I say "more or less" because I think the sense of non-duality, of the numinous, although not capable of description, can be evoked by metaphor, by poetic language (and of course by the other arts).

I haven't said we can't know anything about reality, I have said that the only reality we can be sure of knowing anything about is the human-shaped reality of our common experience.

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair enough. I'll just add, in case of any misundertsnding, that I don't think it is due to convention that we agree as to what is real, even though the agreement itself is a matter of convention. I'm not sure if that will ease your mind and soften your view, but there it is.

I was thinking of it as a question of justice taking it as a given that all political and economic policies should be useful to everyone, and dismissing out of hand that they should just be useful for elites or the privileged; which leaves the question of what use for everyone they should be. I realize this is idealistic, and that nothing is likely to change, that the masses are disempowered and so on, such that all we can do is complain—a sad situation!

Balls!....none of us have...

Right on, brother!

balls. — Banno

What? You have none?

The first should be "Useful for whom?" — Banno

A more useful question would be "useful for what?". For example, we all already know who capitalism is useful for; the salient question is whether it could be made to be useful for diminishing human suffering, or more or less useful for that than other viable political systems.

I am pretty familiar with Husserl, Heidegger, some Merleau Ponty. I understand that Husserl brackets the question of the existence of an external world, and that Heidegger sees the very idea as secondary and derivate of "Being-in-the-world".

I hear you and thanks for your responses. Lawson definitely argues there are better and worse positions to take in terms of social policy and government. He is committed to reducing suffering. But like a number of post-modern thinkers, he seems to be straddling a fine line. Rorty too argued that truth was chimera and yet he affirmed very strong reformist left politics. I think there's a thread of its own on how they do this. In Rorty's words, certain approaches are better for certain purposes. I am interested in his foundational justification for this and haven't read enough to know how it works. How can a criterion of value emerge from all pervasive devaluation? — Tom Storm

Lawson is basically a pragmatist, as I read him. Truth can be defined as "what works best". Those who dislike uncertainty or ambiguity will not be satisfied with this.

So, I see no contradiction in a pragmatist promoting positions of social policy or government on the grounds that some arguably work better than others at, for example, reducing suffering.

It is a revelation about what one intuits when intuition discovers the world that has been pushed out of sight by language and culture. — Astrophel

I agree with this, but this revelation is commonplace; it is with us every instant of everyday experience, in that which exceeds our discursive understandings of what is happening. We just have to learn to notice...

If by discourse you mean language, isnt verbal discourse merely a formalized product of a more fundamental discursive process of inter-affection? And is there ever affect without thought? What is thinking if not construing on the basis of similarities and differences, and what is construing if not a way of being affected by events? Isnt the distinction between thought and feeling arbitrary and unjustified? When dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separately inhering states, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together. — Joshs

Verbal discourse is its own unique form of discourse. There can be kinds of discourse in body language, in visual language or musical language. But it is verbal discourse I referred to, which is explicitly propositional, or at least that is the kind of verbal discourse I had in mind; you know... assertions and arguments to back up those assertions? Objects or entities and their attributes? Dualistic thinking in general?

Of course, thinking is reliant on pattern recognition and recognition of similarity and difference and nothing I've said contradicts that as far as I can tell. In the context of the whole organism there is of course no real separation between thought and feeling, but we are able, discursively, to make the distinction.

Construing can be understood to be a way of being affected by events or a way of dispassionately reflecting on events. Separations are dualistically propositional not real or fundamental —ways of understanding, not of being.

In short, I'm not clear on what you are objecting to, or exactly what point you want to make.

This is kind if a misuse of the original intention of this kind of terminology.

To talk of ‘intersubjectivity’ in relation to ‘reality’ is kind of a contradiction if one understands the intent of phenomenology. — I like sushi

You'll need to back that assertion up with some argument or textual citations. In any case the term 'intersubjectivity' is not owned by phenomenology of whatever stripe you might have in mind, and I was not referencing phenomenology anyway, but just explaining my own understanding of the human epistemic situation.

I have no idea what you are referring to. The implications of our existential situation are a matter of interpretation as I see it. I see science as playing a huge role in any rationally informed understanding of our existential situation.

Do we know what it is for everything to be a convention? Does that include the people engaged in the instituting the convention? Does it include the fact of their agreeing to the convention? Hard to see how they could agree to agree without already agreeing, and without already existing. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think everything is a convention, but I do think that everything we know is conventional. The reality we know is conventional, and yet I think we can reasonably believe that what gives rise to all that is not.

But what's that supposed to mean? Are we granting that we are in fact organisms, entities of which it is permissible to posit behavior? If this too is only a matter of convention, then that's to say it's only a matter of our behavior (how we think and talk) that we are organisms that engage in a certain sort of behavior. How could such behavior be ours, how could it be behavior? — Srap Tasmaner

So, the way I think about it is that the fact that we are organisms is a conventional fact, but that there is also an underlying sense in which organisms are not conventional; a sense which we cannot articulate without turning it into a conventional fact. "That whereof we cannot speak"...?

And yet, as Kant pointed out, we cannot help ourselves speaking about it. I can also see the sense in which this is not a very satisfying answer.

But that child does grow into Shakespeare, a wonder of human history.

Well so it is with his species. To see those little furry things skulking about, burrowing underground or climbing trees to avoid being eaten my those freakin' reptiles, you couldn't guess their descendants would include Will Shakespeare, or that they would one day transform this planet's ecosystem or build machines that could take them into space. But we don't have to guess because we know it did happen. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, it is remarkable what language (and the opposable thumb?) has enabled those little naked apes to do. Of course, fossil fuels have been a fortuitous blessing or curse, without which we arguably would never have breached the atmosphere or even have gotten very far off the ground.

And I agree; none of this would have been predictable. We like to think we have a certain destiny, but that is radically mistaken, human hubris.

Nice! I love Whitman!

Of course! I posted the quote only because Wayfarer's "revelations" were being implicitly compared to divine revelations, in the service of religion instead of science. — Gnomon

I don't know what others had in mind, but I was responding just to your posting of the Einstein quote. There are those who think the metaphysicalist imagination should be unfettered by science, by physicalism, and I don't think Einstein was one of them. That is all my response was concerned with.

Right, except that I'm not prioritising thought over feeling. If anything I go the other way. Thought without affect is of no significance.

On the other hand affect without thought is not without significance but is of no discursive significance.

t is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole. — Astrophel

I agree that what is said is not an adequate reflection of what is experienced.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place? — Astrophel

Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling.

Sure, sure. I just don't have to commit to anything about the origin of language, I don't think.

It was an ape that wrote Lear. Obviously it was an ape that could write. So he was a member of a species that it is capable of language use, however that happened. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I wasn't making any claim about language, or about the adaptive value of language. The point stands if you ask "How long would it take mammals to produce the work of Shakespeare?" and move the starting-point back even more -- but it's not as picturesque as the monkeys. — Srap Tasmaner

I took you to be saying that a monkey descendant has produced the work of Shakespeare. and thus that the experiment has already been run. Obviously the work could not have been produced without language, so I took the role of language in the experiment as implcitly given.

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition — Astrophel

It's not clear to me what you are arguing, or what you are arguing against. The idea of intellectual intuition is the idea that we can hsve purely rational intuitions of reality, or the nature of reality. Are you agreeing with that position or not?

Right, the chain of explanation is always potentially without end. The child can always endlessly ask 'why?'.

Considering the number of posdible combinations of English words, not to mention the almost infintely greater number of possible combinations of the letters, punctuations and spaces, the idea that one of Shakespeare's plays could have been produced by random typing is absurd.

On the other hand the elements combine in only very limited, lawlike ways, and there are only four 'letters' in the genetic code. so it seems a poor analogy.

The philosophical point seems to be that we evolved from ancestral animals along with all the other contemporary species, and that what we are able to do courtesy of language is not something which sets us apart in the sense of being altogether different kinds of beings. Looked at from the perspective of ecology language is one enormous adaptive advantage in one sense, and an enormous disadvantage in another; in that we have been able to continue to overuse resources to our own detriment, whereas other species who do that get knocked back in a timely way.

…which also serves as an ideological attitude, as amply illustrated in many exchanges here. — Wayfarer

When it is presented as a philosophical position it is not so much an ideology as an inference to the best explanation, which is that humans evolved from a common ancestor with other primates to become what they are today. I don't think anyone with half a brain would deny that social and cultural factors also played a huge part in that human evolution, and that language and all it enables sets us apart, for better or worse, from all other animals. To say that the whole thing was somehow planned, a claim for which there can be no evidence, would amount to espousing an ideology.

I don't think Einstein was thinking about imagination as a faculty standing free from science, but rather in its service.

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute. — Astrophel

There are no intuitions (in the ordinary non-Kantian sense) that are not linguistically formed, or at least that can be talked about without putting them into words (and thus interpreting or distorting them). The idea that there are intuitions which directly reveal the "true essence" of reality is a discursively formed idea, which is itself not a "pure intuition".

But then, biologists may be poor judges of philosophical argument. — Wayfarer

As may mystics and theists.

Any "truth" that lacks a truth-maker or corroborating public evidence is reasonably discountable (Hume, Kant, Clifford, Popper, Sagan) except, at best, as a fiction. — 180 Proof

:up: I really cannot see any reason why this should be denied. It seems to me that those who reject it are those who just don't want to accept it. These interminable arguments that are not really arguments at all ! :roll: